You know, we use ad-blockers as well. We gotta keep those servers running though.
Did you know that we publish useful books and run
friendly conferences — crafted for pros like
yourself? E.g. our upcoming SmashingConf Barcelona,
dedicated to smart front-end techniques and design patterns.

For some time, we’ve run up against the limits of what CSS can do. Those who build responsive layouts will freely admit the frustrations and shortcomings of CSS that force us to reach for CSS preprocessors, plugins and other tools to help us write the styles that we’re unable to write with CSS alone. Even still, we run into limitations with what current tools help us accomplish.

Think for a moment of a physical structure. If you’re building a large edifice with weak material, a lot of external support is required to hold it together, and things have to be overbuilt to stay sturdy. When you’re building a website out of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, this external support might look like frameworks, plugins, preprocessors, transpilers, editing tools, package managers and build processes.

With the summer holidays coming up, I’d like to share a couple of inspirational illustrations and photos which I hope will help you daydream and relax. There's no doubt that there are a lot of great techniques out there — they just need to be discovered.

While going through this month's collection, you'll notice some pretty interesting and refreshing color combinations. I've made sure to include a good bunch we can all admire and learn from — I hope you'll agree! Get ready to enter the summer with a big spark of inspiration.

WordPress is a wonderfully powerful CMS that ships with many versatile features giving it the flexibility to work out of the box for a wide range of users. However, if you are a professional building custom themes and plugins, sometimes these features can be problematic.

The same features and options that allow off-the-shelf themes to adapt to many different use cases can sometimes also be used to undermine a carefully designed custom theme built for a specific use case.

Every designer has their favorite prototyping tools. However, when it comes to UX wireframing and prototyping, there is often more than one tool involved. Sooner or later, you find yourself switching from one tool to another to cherry-pick the best ones among them.

Adobe announced Project Comet in October last year to provide a fast and efficient all-in-one solution. A few months ago, the secret behind the codename was revealed and pushed to the public in a preview version: Adobe Experience Design CC (Adobe XD). Made for fast and fluid UX design, XD gives you everything in one neat bundle: it lets you sketch out ideas, create interactive prototypes, test and share them.

Are home page carousels actually helpful to users? Or are they simply popular because they are an easy tool for solving internal discussions in large organizations about who gets to put their banner on the home page?

The short answer is that home page carousels can work, but in practice the vast majority of implementations perform poorly with end users.

One of the biggest risks of building a product is to build the wrong thing. You’ll pour months (even years) into building it, only to realize that you just can’t make it a success. At Hanno, we see this happening time and time again. That’s why we’ve put together a Lean Validation Playbook.

"Lean" in this case means that you’re moving swiftly to figure out what you’re going to build and how you’re going to build it with as few resources as possible. These resources might include time, money and effort. The lean startup methodology is advocated by Eric Reis, who has massively influenced the way we work through his book The Lean Startup.

Any time a user’s experience is interrupted, the chance of them leaving increases. Changing from one page to another will often cause this interruption by showing a white flash of no content, by taking too long to load or by otherwise taking the user out of the context they were in before the new page opened.

Transitions between pages can enhance the experience by retaining (or even improving) the user’s context, maintaining their attention, and providing visual continuity and positive feedback. At the same time, page transitions can also be aesthetically pleasing and fun and can reinforce branding when done well.

Do you like challenges? Are you willing to take on a task that you’ve never come across before, and do it under a deadline? What if, in carrying out the task, you encounter a problem that appears unsolvable? I want to share my experience of using CSS 3D effects for the first time in a real project and to inspire you to take on challenges.

It was an ordinary day when Eugene, a manager at CreativePeople, wrote to me. He sent me a video and explained that he was developing a concept for a new project and was wondering if it was possible for me to develop something like what was in the video.

To help you start into July freshly inspired, artists and designers from across the globe challenged their artistic abilities and created desktop wallpapers for you to indulge in. This monthly creativity mission has been going on for eight years now, and each month the enthusiastic work of the community brings forth interesting, beautiful, and unique results. Wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd.

This post features their designs for July 2016. All wallpapers come in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. A big thank-you to everyone who contributed their ideas! Now could there be a better occasion to freshen up your desktop?

A year and a half ago I released my first premium WordPress plugin, Advanced Ads. It’s true that once the plugin was out, my most important task was support. Support is a crucial element that determines not only the success of the project, but also how happy everyone will be, me included.

With this in mind, I constantly optimized my approach to providing support. Let me share with you what I learned. Read on to find out what I learned about support, the four sides that will help you understand each request, which fears of mine proved to be unfounded, what an efficient support system looks like and, last but not least, how to optimize support.

Prototyping tools have become an important resource for us designers — allowing us to document multiple states of a single screen, including animations, transitions and microinteractions that are hard to represent in static documentation.

Companies that pay attention to this trend have started to build prototyping tools to address this need; and today we're seeing a plethora of tools emerge on a regular basis. But which should you pick? More importantly, what questions should you ask yourself and your team to make sure you choose the right one?

Redux is one of the hottest libraries in front-end development these days. However, many people are confused about what it is and what its benefits are. As the documentation states, Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps. To rephrase that, it's an application data-flow architecture, rather than a traditional library or a framework like Underscore.js and AngularJS.

Redux was created by Dan Abramov around June 2015. It was inspired by Facebook’s Flux and functional programming language Elm. Redux got popular very quickly because of its simplicity, small size (only 2 KB) and great documentation. If you want to learn how Redux works internally and dive deep into the library, consider checking out Dan’s free course.

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As designing static pages has become untenable, many have started to approach design in a modular way.
In this book, we’ll identify what makes an effective design system that empowers teams to
create great digital products.
Pre-order the book now →

Today, too many websites are still inaccessible. In our new book
Inclusive Design Patterns, we explore how to craft
flexible front-end design patterns and make future-proof and accessible interfaces without extra effort. Hardcover, 312 pages.
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Meet the new Sketch Handbook, our brand
new Smashing book that will help you master all the tricky, advanced facets of Sketch. Filled with
practical examples and tutorials in 12 chapters, the book will help you become more proficient in your work.
Get the book.

Trends don’t matter, but techniques do.
With SmashingConf Barcelona, we’ll explore problems,
smart solutions and lessons learned from actual projects.
Taking place on October 17–18 at the Palau de la Música Catalana.
To the tickets →

Home sweet home! On September 11–12th, we're gathering for our 6thSmashingConf Freiburg right next to the legendary Black Forest.
With Umar Hansa, Rachel Andrew, Alla Kholmatova, Chris Wright, and others.
To the tickets →